As a Digital Marketer for Copla Coffee, a fast-growing coffee chain, I’ve had the opportunity to explore growth hacking strategies using social media as our primary channel. One of our most successful initiatives was a social media contest on Instagram, aimed at increasing our follower count and engagement rate. We combined standard promotional strategies with psycho-social elements, keeping in mind Robert Cialdini's principles of influence.
For the contest, we offered a free month of coffee to a randomly selected participant who followed our account, shared the contest post, and tagged three friends in the comments. This strategy effectively used the principles of reciprocity, social proof, and scarcity as defined by Cialdini.
Our Instagram contest resulted in a 40% increase in followers, a sharp uptick in page engagements, and a growth of additional patrons to our coffee shops. We used the lessons learned to implement an ongoing process of A/B testing to consistently refine our growth hacking strategy across all social media platforms.